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Local Colour - Eleven Spitalfields

Preview by Lizzie Guilfoyle

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PAINTINGS and works on paper by Katrina Blannin will be on display at Eleven Spitalfields in an exhibition entitled Local Colour – from April 23 to May 14, 2009.

With a series of coloured triangle compositions inspired by the desire to reduce and simplify, Blannin invites the viewer to take time and engage with a visual language that proposes a multi-coloured harmony and a resolute aesthetic clarity.

In recent paintings the artist aims to convey various sensations corresponding with the everyday impressions of experience.

The process begins with a ‘colour chart’ of colours directly seen through the lens of a camera or drawn from the ‘nature’ of life. They are mixed to a palette acquired from the settings and objects that signify something special in the locale: plastic signage, aged gloss paint and dirty shop fronts.

The quotidian greys, ochres and Indian reds of skies and brick walls are punctuated with the unsaturated hues of front garden roses, blue ice cream, sherbet lemons and crocheted wool. The fairground and amusement arcade lights of the English seaside at dusk and old Technicolor films, add to the accumulation of ‘colour memories’ that pervade the paintings.

As Blannin explains: ‘My palette is the world right here: my experience and what I am remembering. The colour language becomes particular and is intended as much for its evocative ability as its material quality.’

In these meticulously executed paintings, which allude to stained-glass windows, parameters are colour, elemental form and space; the recognition of the interdependence of colour consonance and dissonance; a search for moments of reaction, interaction and a visual logic attained through flat paint adjusted and often re-adjusted. The practice is at first unsystematic and expressive but progressively works with design and balance, and aims for a lucid, formal arrangement.